


With Love and Squalor

by robotsfighting



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, New York, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-03
Updated: 2011-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:55:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsfighting/pseuds/robotsfighting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine's quiet, sudden declaration in the Lima Bean is as unexpected to Kurt as it is terrifying. Interventions ensue, which mostly involve being laughed at.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Love and Squalor

**Author's Note:**

> So! After the finale, I noticed that there was some discussion about Kurt's response to Blaine at the end of the episode being uncertain because of his pause -- and while that wasn't my personal impression, I thought it was a really interesting idea, and I wanted to work with it. So this is that. I promise upfront that it ends well. The title comes from _Nine Stories_ by J.D. Salinger, from the story I imagine Blaine is in the middle of when Kurt finds him.

Kurt’s appearance at Mercedes’ locker fifteen minutes before the warning bell for homeroom was probably more effective than setting an alarm. The boy was like clockwork. When he’d been at Dalton, she had wavered between being fantastically late or depressingly early every single day without him to link his arm through hers and drag her down the hallway while loudly discussing what Rachel had decided passed for clothing that morning. It was so familiar and stupid and _fun_ , and she had missed it like burning, but now he was back and it was all the same again, except for his sudden tendency to smile at her like he had never seen anything so great in his entire life. And she really wasn’t complaining about that.

So he turned up as always while she was getting last-minute fabulous the Monday after Nationals, after seeing each other at the Lima Bean, and she knew it was him even if she didn’t actually turn and look. “Morning again,” she said, sing-song and pleased, ducking to look in the mirror on her locker door and pat at her hair with the palm of her hand. “Santana’s _already_ screaming at somebody about something. Today’s going to be all kinds of interesting.”

There was a pause, where Kurt didn’t say anything immediately scathing and half-affectionate about Santana’s insane outburst at the hotel in New York, and she turned to look at him, frowning. He was staring down at his shiny silver shoes, gripping the strap of his bag with both hands so tightly she thought he would probably break all of his fingers. She couldn’t really see the expression on his face, but she knew that it wasn’t a good one, and a weird fear suddenly curled into her.

“Kurt,” she murmured. “Did something happen?”

Kurt raised his head to look at her. His face was somewhere at the intersection of anxious and miserable, his eyes a little overbright and watery, and he took in a breath that shuddered in the middle before saying, “Blaine told me he loved me this morning.”

Mercedes stared at him for a moment. He looked back at her, breathing through his nose, obviously confused and upset and she didn’t even know what. She frowned a little, shaking her head. “Oh, baby,” she said. “You need a serious intervention.”

She closed her locker before grabbing his arm and pulling him down the hallway, his steps unsteady and surprised behind her until she ducked into an empty classroom and closed the door. The sun poured in through the windows, over the tables, models of the solar system hanging from the ceiling dark and complicated. She turned to face him, squaring her shoulders. “First,” she said, “you need to let go of that bag.” She put her hands over his, gently prying his fingers away from the strap. “That cow died a long time ago, you don’t need to strangle it again.” His grip sufficiently loosened, she took the bag away and carefully set it on a chair, then turned around to take him by the shoulders and back him up until he was sitting on one of the tables.

She settled herself on the table across from him. “Okay,” she said. “Talk.”

Kurt let out a very long breath and didn’t look back up at her until he had emptied his lungs. When he managed, it was a little less like he was going to start flying apart at the seams. Not much of an improvement, but it was something. He closed his eyes. “I was talking about New York and how everyone reacted, and he said that I didn’t seem upset, and I told him that it was still a really great experience. And then he told me that he loved me.”

Mercedes peered at him, frowning. “I’m not getting it,” she said. “Isn’t this a good thing? Boy loves you, hooray?”

He opened his eyes to look at her, very clear and wide-eyed and unsteady. “I don’t know,” he said, a little hysterical. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. One minute we’re sitting there and I’m happy and telling this story and then I’m taking a drink and he’s saying he loves me and the world kind of stops turning for a second and I have no idea what to say.”

She put up her hands, trying to absorb some of the words he was throwing at her. “Okay,” she said. “So what _did_ you say?”

Kurt looked _even more_ miserable, wilting and deflated on the desk, hiding his face in his hands. “I told him I loved him, too,” he said, muffled.

“You meant it, right?”

Kurt didn’t say anything. He just kept his shoulders hunched and his face hidden, probably wrinkling his jacket.

“Kurt,” Mercedes said in a tone that brooked no argument, leaning forward. “You _meant it_ , right?”

“I don’t _know!_ ” Kurt flung his arms out, frustrated, anxious. “I don’t know! He just _said_ it in the middle of the coffee shop at eight in the morning on a Monday and totally blindsided me and then I suddenly had no idea if that was actually how I felt, if this is actually what love is or if I just feel this way because he’s the only gay guy I’ve ever met or because he pays attention to me or something. And what if he doesn’t actually love me? What if he just thinks he does and then in a few weeks he’ll realize that it isn’t actually what he wants and he’ll dump me and I’ll have given him all of these things that I can’t get back and it’ll be horrible and I’ll want to move out of the state or become a priest or something?”

Mercedes was struggling with the amused smile that wanted to slide up her lips. But Kurt dropped his head in his hands again for a few seconds, and when he lifted it back up there were visible tears in his eyes, and her amusement softened into ridiculous love for this ridiculous person. She moved over to sit next to him, wrapping her arms around him. “This is really bothering you, isn’t it?” she murmured, pulling him against her and laying his head against her shoulder. “Kurt, you’re an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a really stupid person.”

Kurt laughed wetly and miserably against her. His fingers curled and dug into the denim of her jacket, and he turned his face closer to her shoulder. “I just want this to be as easy as I thought it was going to be.”

“I know,” she said soothingly. “It pretty much never is, though.”

He sighed, and it made him relax more against her. “I’ve never been in love with someone who loved me back.”

She held him a little closer. “Is that what’s scaring you so bad?”

He nodded, then sniffed. The silence stretched for a little while, with Mercedes rubbing his back and letting him try to get his breathing under control. “This is so much scarier than being in love with a straight guy,” he mumbled.

Mercedes let an indulgent smirk show on her face where Kurt couldn’t see it. “If you’re having commitment issues, I think Puck is the guy everyone usually goes to.”

Kurt laughed into her shoulder. “I’m sure Puck would be thrilled to help me cheat on my boyfriend.” He sat up and away, wiping at his eyes, taking calming breaths and looking down at the floor.

Mercedes watched him for a moment. “You do love him,” she said finally, laying a hand on his knee. “It’s pretty obvious to everyone you’ve ever met.”

He glanced at her, rubbing at his cheeks. He let out a breath. “I do,” he said, like he was admitting something. “I never actually doubted it until he said it. And then I don’t think I really doubted it, I was just – scared.” He shook his head. “I’m really bad at this.”

Mercedes grinned. “I think Blaine’s probably worse,” she said. “He really told you he loved you in the middle of you drinking something?”

Kurt grinned weakly. “I told you about the GAP Fiasco, right? Blaine isn’t good at declarations. I’m lucky he didn’t start singing something inappropriate in the middle of the Lima Bean. They know our orders there. They give him free biscotti. We can’t get banned.”

“That would be a tragedy.” Mercedes jumped up from the desk, and turned to pull Kurt up, too. She smiled at him. “Do you feel better?” she asked.

He nodded, reaching down to pick up his bag then straightening up. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just need to – get used to it. Maybe talk to him about it.” He took in a breath and let it out again, and it didn’t shudder at all. “I’ll be fine.”

“Good.” Mercedes hugged him, and he hugged her back, hard. She laughed, then pulled away and looked him up and down. “But, baby, I have to question the color of those pants.”

Kurt laughed. “Woman, you are not casting aspersions on my outfit. Who wears a denim bolero and a t-shirt broadcasting our miserable failure?”

She smirked, and he smiled back. It didn’t shake, and maybe it was a little thin, but it was so much better than before that she felt something loosen inside of her. And then he slipped his arm through hers and threw the door open and dragged her off down the hallway toward homeroom, and if she was a little late then she really didn’t care too much.

Because Kurt deserved to figure out that it was okay to be happy and loved.

 

“That was smooth.”

“Shut up.”

“No, really. That was _smooth jazz_ , Blaine Anderson. You've got to teach me that sometime. I wonder if it works on girls as well as it worked on Hummelbutt."

“Shut up shut _up_ ,” Blaine groaned into David’s bedspread, muffled and facedown and theatrically despondent. “You are the worst friend. There are no friends worse than you.”

He heard David laughing from where he sat at his desk, and turned his head enough to watch David’s chair tipping perilously back as he craned to look at Blaine, grinning like this was something that was legitimately funny. “You tell me a story like this and then expect me not to make fun of your for it. That just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of my personality.”

Wes was off doing _senior things_ , despite the fact that Blaine desperately needed someone who wouldn’t laugh at him. Wes wasn’t necessarily that person, but Blaine had hoped that he would be so wrapped up in _senior things_ (graduation practice, openly weeping in the hallways) that he would take Blaine seriously. The fact that David was also a senior did nothing to detract from the fact that David enjoyed pointing out when Blaine was an idiot, no matter what else was on his plate.

“You’re taking your mixed emotions over leaving Dalton out on me,” he said, once again into the bedspread.

“No,” David said easily, “this is definitely just how anyone would react.”

Blaine let out a breath that relaxed his entire body into the mattress. He watched his fingers rub against the fuzz on the blanket next to his head. “You didn’t see his face, David,” he said quietly. He closed his eyes. “I’m not laughing.”

He heard David’s hesitation, and then the drop of his chair legs back to the floor and his footsteps crossing the room. The mattress dipped next to Blaine’s hip, and a warm hand fell against his back. “Blaine, I promise you, you didn’t ruin anything.”

Blaine dug his head deeper against the bed. “I can’t believe I just said it like that. We weren’t even doing anything important.”

“Why’re you so upset? He said it back to you, didn’t he?”

Blaine let himself exhale past the sudden tightness of his chest. His hand fisted in the blanket. He squeezed his eyes more tightly closed. “I don’t think he meant it.”

David made a sound that Blaine couldn’t interpret. Then his weight slipped off of the mattress, and Blaine opened his eyes to watch as David sat on the floor, his arms folded on the bed, his chin resting on top of them. He met Blaine’s gaze and smiled a little. “Blaine,” he said, “he loves you. I promise.”

Blaine looked away. “You didn’t see his face,” he mumbled again.

“I don’t have to. I saw it seven months ago when you dragged him into the senior commons and flirted with him in song.” Blaine looked back to him, and David grinned. “I’m pretty sure he only made it to the second chorus before he started planning your wedding.”

Blaine felt his face heat up, and he tried to shove it down. “That was before he knew me. Now he knows what a fuck-up I am.”

He watched David roll his eyes. “You’re an incredibly lovable fuck-up.” David pushed a little closer to the bed, his face suddenly serious, his eyes set against Blaine’s. “Look, I need you to listen to me, because if you screw this up I will seriously come back from MIT and kill you. You and Kurt are two of my favorite people, and you’re almost creepily adorable, and I need you to keep putting photos of yourselves together on Facebook so I can live vicariously through your love.” He reached out and put a hand on Blaine’s shoulder. “You know Kurt better than I do, but I get where he’s coming from a lot of the time. Relationships are hard. You’re the kind of person who throws himself at this stuff because you know eventually you’re going to stick. Kurt is – really not.”

David broke off, and Blaine watched him with a new, weird intensity, his brow furrowed, his mind trying to pull together the things David was saying.

“I don’t really know Kurt’s whole life story,” David continued, “but I’m pretty sure that he’s never been with anyone else, and I know for a fact he isn’t really the kind of person who trusts anything easily. Do you get where I’m going with this?”

Blaine did, suddenly. “I scared the shit out of him today, didn’t I?”

David moved his hand from Blaine’s shoulder to tap his index finger against Blaine’s nose. “Right in one.” Then he stood up and wandered back over to his desk chair.

Blaine flipped over onto his back and raised himself up onto his elbows, watching the back of David’s head. “How do I fix that?”

David shrugged, typing something on his computer. “You need to talk to him. I know that rational conversations about feelings aren’t your forte--”

“I’m getting better at--”

“—but you both sort of fail at that kind of thing, so I think eventually you’ll stumble around until you meet each other at the middle.”

Blaine considered this. He let himself fall back against the bed, looking up at the ceiling. “When did you become Gay Yoda?” he asked quietly.

“I like to think that I’m Equal Opportunity Yoda,” David told his computer screen. Then he looked back over his shoulder, and Blaine caught his soft smile. “I’m leaving soon,” he said. “I want you to be happy.”

Blaine swung his legs over the side of the bed, pushed himself to his feet, crossed the room and threw his arms around David’s shoulders. David laughed, then turned in his arms, hugging him back with the chair between them, and Blaine could feel David grinning against his chest.

“You really think he’s just scared?” Blaine asked, looking at the corkboard over David’s desk; pictures of the Warblers, pictures of David and Wes together, pictures of David’s family, a picture of Blaine jumping off of something.

David patted his back. “I think you’re both just stupid enough to work.”

 

From: Kurt  
 _Hey, do you mind if I come and visit you today?_

From: Blaine  
 _Not at all. Text me when you get here._

From: Kurt  
 _See you then._

 

Kurt found Blaine at the lake, just where his roommate said he would be. He was sitting at the base of a tree, a book open in his hands. The water was spread out before him, wide and deep and going on forever, bouncing late-afternoon sunlight over its surface, and the sight of Blaine sitting there made Kurt stop. It made Kurt stand still, and watch, and consider what he was looking at: Blaine’s neck curved down to read the book between his bent knees, his hair sun-dappled, his face half in shadow. Blaine held himself small and close together, relaxed back against rough bark with the easy arc of his spine. His fingers drummed on the orange and blue paperback, until he started to turn the page very slowly, not finished with the previous page until he flicked his eyes up to the top of the next.

 _This is the person you’re in love with,_ Kurt thought. _This is the person who is in love with you._ Something swelled in his chest and made him dizzy at that thought, just that astounding little thought that made his face heat up and his eyes prickle, because the _truth_ of it hit him right at that moment, watching Blaine turn the page again and run his finger across a line. This was something incontrovertibly _real_ , and it was terrifying, but it was also amazing.

So he kept moving, maybe hurrying a little, his footsteps soft on the dirt path as he kept rounding the edge of the late, and Blaine didn’t notice him approaching at all, too caught up in his book ( _Nine Stories_ , Kurt noticed as he got closer) to hear anything outside of the words he was reading. It wasn’t until Kurt was standing directly over him that Blaine seemed to come back to himself, with Kurt’s shadow falling over the pages, but before Blaine could lift his head to look, Kurt said, “I love you.”

Blaine tilted his face up, a smile stretching across it when he saw that it was Kurt, his voice caught between surprised pleasure and concern. “Kurt! I thought you were going to--”

And then he stopped, when Kurt’s _I love you_ seemed to connect to whatever it needed to connect to in his head. His eyebrows rose, and his mouth dropped open, and this look – this expression passed over his face and held there, this shine in his eyes like he had _won something_ , all ecstatic disbelief and amazement, and oh, this was _Kurt’s_ , this was all Kurt’s, and he couldn’t believe it was something he’d doubted.

Kurt dropped to one knee and reached out both of his hands to cup either side of Blaine’s face, almost level with his, his thumbs brushing over the arches of Blaine’s cheeks. Then he bent forward and pressed their lips together. Blaine’s book tumbled to the ground and he reached out to touch Kurt back, to press one hand into Kurt’s waist and tangle the other in Kurt’s hair. He tilted his head to deepen the kiss, and Kurt smiled against his mouth and shifted closer.

He sat back after a very long moment, having somehow ended up straddling Blaine’s legs. He moved his hands to grip at the lapels of Blaine’s jacket, and Blaine kept staring at him like he was something not entirely real.

Kurt smiled a little. “What?”

Blaine shook his head, and then he laughed. He fell back against the tree, his entire body relaxing. He matched the hand at Kurt’s waist with the other. “I just – that was really unexpected.”

Kurt shrugged. “Yes, well. So was yours.”

Something darker passed over Blaine’s face, and his gripped tightened almost imperceptibly. “I’m so sorry about this morning,” he said, brow furrowed, mouth drawn down. “I put you on the spot. That wasn’t fair.”

Kurt smoothed Blaine’s lapels down with flat palms, shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have reacted the way that I did.”

“No, no,” Blaine said, sitting up a little, “you had every right to react however you wanted to – it was really inappropriate to just say it out of nowhere like that and expect you to be perfectly okay with--”

“ _Blaine_ ,” Kurt intoned, looking down at him, directly in the eye. “Shut up for a second.”

Blaine closed his mouth, lips twitching at the corners with suppressed amusement.

Kurt straightened his back, sitting higher over Blaine, hands against Blaine’s chest, one palm over his heart. “I’m okay with both of us being bad at this stuff, as long as we get to this part eventually. You’re going to blurt things out randomly while I’m drinking something and I’m going to get completely terrified and react badly, but eventually I’m going to end up straddling you under a tree.” He leaned a little closer. “I’m sorry that I didn’t say it this morning the way you probably imagined. _That_ wasn’t fair. I just wasn’t ready to hear it right at that moment.” A pause. “But I probably am now,” he added quietly.

Blaine smiled slowly. His hands traveled up from Kurt’s waist, against his chest, over his neck, to frame either side of his face, and he pulled Kurt very gently down to kiss him, barely a brush of their lips together. And without moving away, so that Kurt felt the words as they were spoken, puffs of breath against his skin, Blaine murmured, “I love you.”

Kurt felt a shiver go through him, all over, and his stomach dropped and fluttered. He relaxed his whole body against Blaine’s, his head against Blaine’s shoulder and their legs straightened and tangled together. This was what it was supposed to feel like. Like he had never heard something more important or safe in his entire life.

He felt Blaine smile and move his head to set his mouth against Kurt’s ear, and whisper quietly and endlessly, over and over again, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you--”

Kurt pressed his hand over Blaine’s mouth, grinning against his neck. “I love you, too.” Beneath him, he felt Blaine jump a little, like the words carried electricity, and his arms tightened around Kurt’s shoulders as he pressed a grinning kiss against Kurt’s palm.

Kurt shifted closer against Blaine, closing his eyes. “If you lick my hand, I will end you,” he murmured.

Blaine just hummed happily behind Kurt’s hand, as if he hadn’t been thinking that at all.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a tiny companion piece to this, mostly just to amuse myself, and put it up on Tumblr for those who might be interested. [ What I think actually happened between Mercedes and Kurt that morning at school.](http://robotsfighting.tumblr.com/post/7049122303/wlascompanion)


End file.
